Tag: Rants

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has completely redefined the modern entertainment zeitgeist to the point where it’s difficult to remember a time when shared universe storytelling did not infect every aspect of pop culture. (Not necessarily a bad thing.)

Still, if the recent path of Marvel’s relatively low-budget Netflix offshoot of its uber successful mainstream cinema fare is any indication, even a juggernaut praised as much for financial success as storytelling quality can falter.

With The Defenders, I fear the “neighborhood” MCU Daredevil did such a great job of setting up seems poised upon the brink of narrative oblivion.

In today’s world of discourse—much the same as any other time, I’m sure—hot takes have risen to supplant nuance. There’s too much white noise to sift through to get actionable information. We want opinions, dammit!

As an unfortunate consequence, this trend has given rise to the propensity to use the word “rated” far too readily to make oneself heard in the crowded and discordant halls of fandom. More specifically, that singular word directly preceded by the modifier “over,” or, as I submit to you now, “under.”

I don’t pretend to be immune to the trend. In fact, I nearly crafted a shouty title to plaster all over this one. I read this series about ten years ago, and, since I rarely—if ever—see it mentioned, I naturally feel that it’s vastly underrated. More likely, it’s merely underread—a key difference, since most people I speak to who have read it would heartily recommend it.

Anyway, here’s a brief rundown of the reasons why you should probably, possibly, maybe check out The Renshai Trilogy and The Renshai Chronicles by Mickey Zucher Reichert.

About halfway through Rogue One, I found myself taking a mental tally, going over the characters I’d met, the events that had already unfolded and the threads and arcs that had been set up, and wondering, flatly, whether or not I loved the film or merely liked it to that point.

While that may seem like a criticism on the surface, it’s really just a testament to the sort of layered, multifaceted film Gareth Edwards has given us here.

Halfway through this movie, I stopped seeing the characters as heroes on the page or screen and started reacting to them emotionally as if they were people – real people I was witnessing endure in the face of overwhelming odds. Despite the film’s flaws — and there are some — it is the characters who push this entry in the Star Wars canon from simply good into the realm of great.

So, that’s a little something about me and my movie tastes, but it’s beside the point. The merciless critic bashing on the new run of DC movies—particularly Batman v. Superman and the aforementioned Squad—and the misguided fan backlash toward said critics has really started to grate on me for one reason above all others: audiences have no idea what makes a movie successful, and they have no idea what constitutes a cinematic failure.

In brief, I’m going to try to explain why that movie you may have liked—but which, contrary to various ill-advised petitions—was not well-liked by the majority, is being called a failure even as it rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars.